My kitchen mixer has 3 buttons, 2 dials and a simple display. It can do some stuff, like cook for a certain number of minutes or beat at a certain speed. Simply put, it can do one thing and then has to be set to do another thing.

Why is it not programmable? Why can’t I set it to kneed and heat the dough 4 hours before I rise in the morning?

To be honest, I would not want it to have a user interface to solve all the situations I would come up with since I have seen how bad it is when hardware people try to solve a programming problem. Just look at your car, how much did you pay for the navigator that is both clunky and out of date compared to the google maps you have on your phone? Or think of the kids’ toy that started as a wifi connected state-of-the-art thing to play with but ended as a hacker’s dream with an attached camera.

So instead let all the motors and servos in the machine have a well known (bluetooth) interface. Then connect your phone or have a cheap android phone attached to the machine with for instance magnets. Cheap. Easy replacable. Updatable.

Now your Kenwood mixer can kneed and let the dough rise and the Siemens oven can be started in time for your Electrolux coffee brewer aroma accelerated wake up. These three slow turning kitchen appliance giants don’t have to learn how to cooperate but you can teach their stuff to do.

Your phone is typically set to lock its screen after a minute or so of not touching it.
This is really a problem when trying to follow a recipe.

Why not write an app that complements the Flight mode, Movie mode, Meeting mode and Whatnot modes there are, with a Recipe mode.

This Recipe mode, in its simplest solution would just turn of locking and turning off the screen. In a more advanced solution it would lock the screen but let the web page with the recipe still be on and scrollable.

Say you and your spouse is shopping food together. You are both running in the same store and looking for the same goods. You have to check in with each other often to sync what each have taken and what you should continue with.

Instead there could be an app, or simple web site, that does the syncing.
Let’s say you have a shopping list stored in your phone. You give it, or you are given, a unique id. Give this code to your spouse.
As soon as you check any item on the list a signal is sent to the other phone, directly or over internet, to check the item on other phones using the same code.
That way you can go shopping together without having to go back and forth to the shopping cart to discuss.

Extra bells and whistles could be the ability to send small messages like “double the milk” or “do we have eggs at home?”

They synchronise nicely and allow the whole family use the same list; very good for updating the shopping list at work for the one at paternal leave at home.

What I miss though is:

I want it to reorder my shopping list to be a pickup list in the same order as in the store. It could sense in which order I ticked off the items and make guesstimates the next time I fill out the list. I don’t know exactly what the algorithm should like. There are different list orders for different shops.

It should change behaviour when I enter the list and when I am in the shop. It could be a switch or it could use geo info and automagically switch.

If it uses geo data it can also differ between different stores and alter the list’s order to the actual shop.

Ok, so now the app or html knows where we are and what to shop. Time to get offers and alternatives. The shop has offers, the suppliers might have offers, there might be third parties with offers, neighbouring shops might have offers. Download and show.